Breitbard’s Hall finally catches up to speedy ‘Hambone’

Art “Hambone” Williams was the 1959 Southern California Player of the Year while playing basketball at San Diego High and later played in the NBA. Williams will be inducted into the San Diego Hall of Champions. He is shown here at the Martin Luther King Recreation Center on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012.

Art “Hambone” Williams was the 1959 Southern California Player of the Year while playing basketball at San Diego High and later played in the NBA. Williams will be inducted into the San Diego Hall of Champions. He is shown here at the Martin Luther King Recreation Center on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012.

Hambone doesn’t like to wait, even if it’s for all good things. Hambone played basketball fast, played it at 100 mph, played it with flash and flair from the blacktop of Memorial Junior High to the parquet floor of Boston Garden. Hambone could play, all right. Hambone could take you any time on any surface, whenever he felt the urge.

Arthur “Hambone” Williams is 72 years old now and doesn’t move around as he once did, driven around most of the time by delightful lady friend Paris Wilmore, but that doesn’t mean he still isn’t as sharp as one of the 2,377 assists he handed out as a professional point guard.

Breitbard Hall of Fame

This is the one of four profiles of the four local athletes to be inducted into the Breitbard Hall of Fame Wednesday night in Mission Valley.

Correction

An earlier version of this column had Williams talking about a player named Edward Lee John; it’s actually Johnson. And the column said All-SCIF covered all of Southern California. It was actually all of Southern California except for the Los Angeles City Section.

So, when the former San Diego High, City College, Cal Poly Pomona, San Diego Rockets, Boston Celtics, and (ABA’s) San Diego Conquistadors star got word he will be among the class of four to be inducted Wednesday night into the Breitbard Hall of Fame, he could only think of one thing: What took so long?

“I feel good about it in some ways and in some ways I don’t; 37 years is a long time to wait,” says Williams, going back to the final season of his playing days, 1974-1975 with the Conquistadors. “I feel like one of the Tuskegee Airmen. That’s a long time to wait for something I accomplished long ago.”

But he smiles when he says it. Hambone can’t help but smile. He probably smiled when someone gave him one of the great nicknames in the history of sports, although to this day he has no idea why, but it stuck, shortly after he and his family moved to San Diego from Bonham, Texas, in 1953.

“I was at Memorial and some guys were going to play football before home room,” he recalls. “I had just gotten here and didn’t know anybody. They were choosing up sides and some guy hollered out, “Hambone!” They wanted me to play but didn’t know my name. For some reason, I responded to it. Now, if you call me Arthur Williams, I probably won’t answer. Kind of like Meadowlark Lemon.”

His story, of course, is among the more remarkable in the history of organized basketball.

We can start from his days at San Diego High.

“I didn’t even play basketball until 11th grade at San Diego,” he says. “I used to play against Coach (Jerry) Dahms all the time in gym class and I’d beat him all the time. He told me to go out for the team. So I did and we were good; Red Flannery, Jack Henn, Ezell Singleton, the late Bobby Anderson, the late Edward Lee Johnson and Artist Gilbert were on those teams.”